Creating a Successful LinkedIn Page, Part 1: Your Profile
Are you on LinkedIn? If you’re a business owner, do you have a company page?
LinkedIn can be a powerful tool for connecting with others, and for acquiring business leads — but setting up a page and connecting with a few colleagues isn’t enough. You’ll need to polish your page so it meet’s LinkedIn’s best practices if you want to achieve “All-star” status.
In this installment of our LinkedIn series, we’ll take a look at how to populate the first two sections of your profile page — specifically your “masthead” at the top of the page, and the “Experience” section. This is relevant to business owners and individuals, alike.
Populating Your LinkedIn Profile Page Masthead
This is the top section of your profile page, and in addition to populating it with your name, email and phone number, you’ll also want to populate the following regions.
Professional Headline: This is where you inform people as to what you do as a professional. LinkedIn is looking for optimal keywords & keyword phrases in this section. It’s one of the ways they assess the relevance and authority of your LinkedIn profile. Keywords also help LinkedIn tag you correctly so you show up in the right search results within LinkedIn and on Google, too!
Location & Industry: Location is pretty straight forward, but you might not find an exact industry match. Choose the industry that’s the best match from the choices provided. If you’re not sure, look at other people’s LinkedIn pages that do what you do. What are they listing for their industry?
Photo: This is probably everybody’s least favorite thing to populate. But alas, it must be done! Choose a good, natural photo of yourself and make sure it has enough resolution so it’s clear. If another professional arrives at your LinkedIn page and you have no photo, or a poor photo, your credibility has already taken a hit.
Address: Typically, you’ll only want to fill this out if you’re a business owner with a physical address, like Tingalls Graphic Design has. If your business address is your home address, consider whether this is information that’s wise for you to share.
Websites & Twitter Handle: LinkedIn allows you to add up to three website or blog URLs, so be sure to take advantage of this and populate it! There’s also a place for your Twitter handle, as well.
Populating the Experience Section on Your LinkedIn Profile Page
Your experience section may seem self explanatory, but it’s not. Most people simply load the information from their resume into this section, but you’ll need to do more in order to attain that all-star status I mentioned earlier.
Your experience section, just like your professional headline, needs to be populated with relevant keywords. These are going to work as identifiers for LinkedIn, delivering you to people who may be looking for the types of services or products you provide.
LinkedIn also allows you to add up to 5 links to other web pages, videos, blog posts, etc., to the bottom of each job experience you list. This can add instant credibility to your LinkedIn page, and it can also increase your profile’s SEO value when you add keywords to the title of each link.
Need more help with keywords, or setting up your LinkedIn profile?
Contact Tingalls Graphic Design for a free consultation. We’d love to help!
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